Wednesday, September 28, 2016

I watched two politically themed
programs on PBS last night, the episode of The Contenders about Mitt Romney’s and Michael Dukakis’ hapless
Presidential campaigns (see below) and The Choice 2016, the special episode of Frontline PBS shows every Presidential election year dealing with
the major-party nominees for President and their backgrounds and histories.
This one proved more interesting than usual, especially one day after the
debate during which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had at each other, looking
less like aspirants for power in a representative republic than like medieval
knights jousting for possession of a kingdom. Clinton and Trump emerged from Frontline’s treatment as fascinating figures, though it got off to a
bad start when it attempted to locate Donald Trump’s “Rosebud” moment — the
time he actually decided to run for President and be the person who assumes
power when Barack Obama relinquishes it as per the Constitution on January 20,
2017 — as the White House Press Correspondents’ Dinner in April 2011. This
occurred right after Obama, following years of urging from Trump and other
Right-wing conspiratologists, finally released his “long-form” birth
certificate indicating that, as no one outside of the circle of Right-wing
nut-cases Trump had been palling with seriously doubted, he had been born when
and where he always said he was: August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawai’i. With
Trump in the audience, Obama said, “No one is happier, no one is prouder
to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. [laughter]
And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that
matter — like, did we fake the moon landing? [laughter] What really
happened in Roswell? [laughter] And where are Biggie and Tupac? [laughter]
All kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of
experience. [laughter] For example— no, seriously, just recently in an
episode of Celebrity Apprentice[laughter] at the steakhouse,
the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there
was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real
problem was a lack of leadership. And so, ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil’ Jon
or Meatloaf. [laughter] You fired Gary Busey. [laughter] And
these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. [laughter
and applause] Well handled, sir! [laughter] Well handled. Say
what you will about Mr. Trump, he certainly would bring some change to the
White House. Let’s see what we’ve got up there,” showing a slide of the White
House with an upper extension built on top and a sign hanging from it reading
“Trump Resort Hotel and Casino.”

While the opening of this show seemed really to be reaching — the fact is that Trump was flirting
with a Presidential run as early as 1980 and had booked a rally in New
Hampshire in 2000 to announce either that he was running or he wasn’t (and of
course he didn’t) — the allegation is certainly believable as an example of
Trump’s bizarre pettiness, his unwillingness to roll with any punch or take any insult, no matter what or from whom. And coupled
with that is his equally bizarre insistence on never apologizing, never
admitting he’s wrong about anything,
never even acknowledging that he’s ever made a mistake, much less that he’s
learned from one. I’m currently working on an article on last Monday’s
Presidential debate between Clinton and Trump for my Zenger’s
Newsmagazine blog, http://zengersmag.blogspot.com, and
one of my arguments is that much of Trump’s rhetorical strategy comes from
George Orwell’s 1984,
particularly the concepts of doublethink and “the mutability of the past.” In plain English (instead of
Newspeak, the language the rulers of Orwell’s dystopia invented to make dissent
literally impossible because the words to speak or think heretical thoughts
would not exist), doublethink is
the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in your head and believe in both
of them at once. “The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried
out with sufficient precision,” Orwell wrote, “but it also has to be
unconscious, or it would bring with it a sense of falsity, and hence of guilt.
… Even in using the word doublethink
it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality;
by a fresh act of doublethink one
erases this knowledge: and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one step
ahead of the truth.” The related concept of “the mutability of the past” holds
that the past has no objective existence; we know what happened in the past
only via public records and our own memories, and if the records are altered
and our memories lost or changed, the past itself has changed — and yet the
past has never changed, because only one version of the past can be “true” at
any moment.

Orwell worked out these concepts observing the totalitarian
governments of the 1930’s — Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and especially Soviet
Russia under Stalin — and in particular their ability to throw out entire
histories once they became politically inconvenient, as Stalin did in 1939 when
he decided it was politically convenient to ally the Soviet Union with Nazi
Germany, and again in 1941 when the Nazis invaded anyway and forced him to
shift sides, whereupon he proclaimed that he’d always been anti-Fascist and got
the two other major powers in the anti-Nazi coalition, the U.S. and Britain, to
accept him as an ally. Trump’s portrayal of his own history is full of doublethink and the mutability of the past; he’s been able to
“sell” his business record to the American people as an example of one
sparkling success after another, when in fact virtually his entire empire came
crumbling down in the early 1990’s after his mega-casino in Atlantic City, the Taj
Mahal, bombed financially. Trump’s first reaction was to use his clout on Wall
Street to get Marvin Roffman, the analyst who first published evidence of the
weaknesses in Trump’s operations, fired. Then he had to deal with the banks
who’d loaned him the money to build the Taj Mahal and other casinos, to buy the
Trump Shuttle airline,the Trump
Princess yacht, and other investments that now seemed big-time money-losers.
“As quickly as the banks loved him, that’s as quick as they saw him as a
pariah,” recalled Abraham Wallach, a vice-president in the Trump Organization
from 1991 to 2003. “He was, like, ‘Oh, it’s Donald Trump!’ They didn’t want to
have anything to do with him. They wanted their money, and they wanted to be
rid of Donald Trump.” The only thing that saved him was that the banks suddenly
realized that if they did the obvious thing and foreclosed on Trump, they’d be
stuck with a lot of white-elephant casinos no one would go to and they’d
ultimately have to close them down themselves and get stuck with the losses.

So
they cut a deal with Trump by which he got to keep his name on the various
buildings because the bankers figured they’d be more attractive to customers
with Trump’s name on them than without it — and this led Trump to change the
whole modus operandi of his
business from actually building housing developments, hotels and casinos to
selling the rights to his name, so he could have the thrill of seeing people
drawn by his name and receive hefty royalties without actually having the
bothersome business of building or running the buildings. (This may help
explain the argument he had with editors of a magazine that estimated Trump’s
wealth as $4 billion, and he contacted them to say it should be $10 billion.
When they asked the obvious question — where did the extra $6 billion come
from? — he said, “That’s the value of the Trump name.”) Then he got the offer
to host the NBC-TV “reality” series The Apprentice, a political Godsend in being able to merchandise
himself as a businessman of infinite sagacity and skill, and therefore just
what this country would need as it came out of the Obama years with a deeply
troubled sense of itself: a person with tested leadership skills — albeit in a
totally different field from politics — offering himself not only as a person
uniquely qualified to sweep the cobwebbed institutions and their sclerotic
officials from power and to take over, but the only one who can do so. ““We
defend Japan, we defend Germany, we defend South Korea, we defend Saudi Arabia,
we defend countries,” Trump said during last Monday’s debate. “They do not pay
us, but they should be paying us, because we are providing tremendous service
and we're losing a fortune.” “There’s certainly an argument that U.S. allies
should spend more money on defense, including higher subsidies for U.S. bases
in their countries,” Los Angeles
Times columnist Doyle McManus wrote in the
paper’s September 28 edition. “But do we really want to convert mutual defense
treaties into contract-for-service agreements? There’s no sign that Trump has
spent even a minute weighing the consequences of such a shift.” That’s an
example of Trump’s inability or unwillingness to understand the difference
between running a business and running a country — between being in it to
maximize returns for your investors and being in it to serve the people of your
nation and your world.

Not surprisingly, the Frontline segments on Hillary Clinton — in previous years they
actually did one candidate’s profile and then the other’s, but more recently
they’ve followed a more chronological approach and intercut between both —
aren’t quite as interesting because we’re simply more familiar with her story
than his: as the wife of a President (and a state governor before that) and
later as a U.S. Senator from New York (where her tenure and her husband’s in
the White House overlapped by 17 days, a product of the quirk in the U.S.
Constitution that the new Congress takes office January 3 and the new President
not until January 20) and as Secretary of State during President Obama’s first
term. The most interesting thing this documentary had to say about Clinton is
an attempt to explain her obsession with secrecy, saying there were a lot of
arguments in her family home when she was a child. “There was a lot of
fighting in the Rodham household, and I don’t think she invited many friends
home,” author and Clinton friend Gail Sheehy said in the program. “That’s when
her whole penchant for secrecy and privacy began.” The show tracks Clinton
through to her first public appearance that got noticed nationwide — her
controversial speech at Wellesley University’s commencement ceremony in 1969,
where she followed Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke (an African-American, a
Republican and only the second Black U.S. Senator — Hiram Revels of
Mississippi, elected in 1870 during Reconstruction and also a Republican, was
the first; an African-American Democrat
would not serve in the Senate until Carol Moseley Braun was elected in Illinois
in 1992, and she would be defeated for re-election six years later), took notes
throughout Brooke’s speech and then got up and blasted him for telling the
young people graduating there that politics was “the art of the possible.”

Hillary said that politics should be the art of “making the impossible
possible” — which clearly echoed Robert F. Kennedy’s famous remark that “some
people see the world as it is; I see the world as it could be and wonder, ‘Why
not?’” — and, needless to say, the makers of this documentary couldn’t help but
notice the irony that in 2016 Clinton was basically taking Brooke’s side in
this debate and marketing herself to Democratic primary voters as “the
progressive who can get things done.” (Then again, it’s not uncommon for young
firebrands who get elected to office or thrust in the political public eye to
move towards the center and appear to contradict the beliefs they started with;
just compare John Kerry’s plaint in 1971 about how could the President ask the
last man to die for a mistake in Viet Nam with his vote for George W. Bush’s
war in Iraq 30 years later.) No doubt Clinton’s penchant for secrecy got a
major push when she became part of the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee
in 1973 and, as part of her job, she was obliged to keep mum and not tell anyone about its inner deliberations — and her career got
thrown a curveball when, after Nixon’s resignation and with the legal world of
D.C. seemingly open to her for the asking, she failed the D.C. bar exam and
took that as an omen that she should accept the marriage proposal of her
on-again, off-again boyfriend, William Jefferson Clinton, even though that
meant moving with him to the backwater state of Arkansas. She was viscerally
hated once she got there for not being Southern (she even affected a bit of a
twang in her voice for a while, shaking it only when she got back to D.C. as
First Lady), for dressing like a hippie and wearing big glasses, for not having
a child and for insisting on using her family name, Rodham, instead of Clinton.
Bill Clinton got elected attorney general of Arkansas and then won the state’s
governorship in 1978 — only to lose it again two years later; under the
tutelage of sometimes-Democrat, sometimes-Republican political consultant Dick
Morris, both Clintons revamped their images. The next time Bill Clinton ran for
governor in 1982, Hillary had a baby, Chelsea; she dressed more demurely and
lost the big glasses; and she solemnly gave a press conference at which she
announced that from then on her name was Hillary Rodham Clinton. Bill won back the governorship and held it until he
ran for President in 1992.

The rest of the story we pretty much know: the
“bimbo eruptions” and the scandal over Bill’s affair with Gennifer Flowers that
threatened to sink Bill’s Presidential candidacy even before it really started;
the big election victory in 1992; Hillary’s appointment as head of the
administration’s task force on reforming health insurance (and the total
secrecy she insisted on, to the point where nobody knew what was in the plan until it was unveiled —
and promptly sank in Congress thanks to a Republican disinformation campaign
that used some of the same tricks with which they tried to derail Obamacare 16
years later, notably one appearance in which a Republican Congressmember held
up Franklin Roosevelt’s original Social Security Act and noted it was only 38
pages long versus the 1,342 pages of Hillary Clinton’s health care proposal);
the crushing defeat of the Democrats in the 1994 midterms that (like their
equally crushing defeat 16 years later after Obamacare passed with no Republican Senators or Congressmembers voting for
it) served notice that health reform was a majority-killer for the Democratic
Party; Bill Clinton’s Morris-inspired retreat to “small ball” initiatives and
the alienation of many progressives (including Robert Reich, UC Berkeley
professor and longtime friend of Bill Clinton, who was Secretary of Labor in
the first Bill Clinton Cabinet but eventually quit in disgust and returned to
academe; he’s interviewed extensively here about the Clintons’ history but not,
surprisingly, about his eventual break with them and his endorsement of Bernie
Sanders over Hillary in this year’s Democratic primary campaign); the renewed
allegations about Bill Clinton’s sex life that led to his impeachment and
near-removal from office (like the only other President to be impeached, Andrew
Johnson, he was saved only by the Constitution’s insistence that a two-thirds
majority of the U.S. Senate be required to convict a President and remove him
or her for office — and I say “or her” because I think there’s an excellent
chance that if Hillary wins the election this year, the Republicans in Congress
will immediately file articles of impeachment against her over the e-mail
scandal and its alleged threat to U.S. national security, and Hillary could
very well become the third President in U.S. history, and the second one named
Clinton, to face an impeachment trial); her immediate plotting of a U.S. Senate race from New York as soon
as Bill Clinton was acquitted in the impeachment trial and her subsequent
adventures and misadventures as Secretary of State in President Obama’s first
term.

The end of the story feels rushed — there’s no mention of Bernie Sanders
and he’s visible only in a brief still — and it’s an indication that even in
the relatively objective precincts of PBS, the filmmakers, director Michael
Kirk and his co-writer Mike Riser, are far more interested in Trump than
Clinton (he’s a novelty, she’s old hat), beginning their discussion of Trump
with the lesson he learned from his father that some people are winners, some
people are losers, and it’s the job of the losers to do what the winners
tellthem to and otherwise stay
out of their way, and ending it with this comment from Tony Schwartz, co-author
of Trump’s best-selling 1987 autobiography The Art of the Deal, suggesting that, like Alexander the Great, Trump had
run out of worlds to conquer. “His deepest hunger has always been for
attention, and he had exhausted the ways in which to get attention,” Schwartz
said. “He’d gone so far beyond what most human beings can even imagine that he
was at the end of that road, still hungry. He wanted the attention of the
nation. He wanted the attention of the world. And he’s gotten it.”

First of PBS’s two political shows last night was the third episode of The Contenders, “The Technocrats,” which profiled (in that order)
Mitt Romney and Michael Dukakis, both candidates who ran for the Presidency
after having been relatively successful governors of Massachusetts and who — at
least in this program’s analysis — lost largely because they let their
opponents’ campaigns define them for the voters without hitting back. Dukakis (to
restore the chronology of real life instead of the sequence of this show) comes
off even today (they interviewed him extensively and he’s got grey hair but
still has that little-boy look that made him seem ludicrous in that infamous
image showing him driving a tank — he was actually trying to make a good, and
prophetic, point, that the next wars the U.S. was going to fight would be on
land in desert environments and therefore a buildup of our tank and helicopter
forces would be necessary, but he looked all too much like Alfred E. Neuman to
pull it off) as almost terminally naïve, saying that he had wanted to run a
campaign on policy and talk about the issues. Well, as soon as a Presidential
candidate says that he (or she) wants to “talk about the issues” you might as
well start measuring their political grave: Americans really don’t vote for
President on the basis of “issues,” though they like to say they do. They vote for President on the basis of how
the various candidates make them feel about themselves, their country and their
future, and while sometimes a candidate can pick out an issue and use it to
define him- or herself the way Donald Trump has done so successfully this year
with immigration (his fierce anti-immigrant stance has worked for him by sending
white voters the signal, “This country has been taken away from you, and I will
bring it back for you”), Presidential campaigns (all American campaigns, actually, but Presidential
campaigns essentially) are based on the images the candidates project and the
feelings those images evoke in would-be voters. That’s the difference between a
political system like ours which is based on the personalities of individual
candidates and one like those in most European countries that are based on
ideologically coherent political parties (and more than two of them!); most
Europeans vote on the basis of parties and their ideologies rather than
individual candidates, and most European countries have some sort of
proportional representation so that minor parties can achieve real
representation and real power and voters aren’t faced over and over and over again with the damnable choice between just two
significant parties the way we are. (Great Britain is the great outlier on this
one: they have a parliamentary system, in which the majority party in the
legislature is automatically the
governing executive party and therefore the split governments that bedevil the
U.S. are impossible under their system, but they’ve copied us — we copied them, actually — in electing the legislature in single-member
winner-take-all districts and therefore they have a system in which only two
parties at a time are really significant.)

The 1988 Presidential election was
an odd one in that both major-party nominees were really colorless people — I
remember a Los Angeles Times
cartoon of Dukakis and George H. W. Bush in which the punch line was, “You said
you wanted a Presidential election that wasn’t about personalities? You just
got one” — and this profile of Dukakis focused on the horrendous negative
attack ads run against him by Lee Atwater and the Republican “dark arts”
operatives (I remember saying when Karl Rove was running similar black magic
for George W. Bush against John Kerry that “Karl Rove isn’t doing anything Lee
Atwater didn’t do before him, who didn’t do anything H. R. Haldeman hadn’t done
before him, who didn’t do anything Murray Chotiner hadn’t done before him”), including dredging up Willie Horton — though the
show didn’t mention that Horton’s case was first discovered by Al Gore’s
opposition research team while he was running against Dukakis in the Democratic
Presidential primaries. Certainly the Horton ad hurt — one commentator on this
show notes that there were white
criminals who also took advantage of Dukakis’ work-furlough program and
committed additional crimes, but Atwater picked the Black one to touch on
voters’ primal fears of Black men raping white women — as did Dukakis’ own
missteps (like the tank photo op), but the main thing George H. W. Bush had
going for him during that campaign was the incredible popularity of Ronald
Reagan and the fact that, barred by the 22nd Amendment (that
short-sighted bit of political legerdemain pulled by the Republicans in 1947 to
ensure there’d never be another Franklin Roosevelt — the irony being that the
two Presidents since then who could
have won third terms if they’d been constitutionally eligible to run for them
were both Republicans, Eisenhower and Reagan) from running for re-election
himself, Reagan was pushing hard for Bush as his successor. Reagan even
answered the question about what Bush had done during his administration quite
differently from Eisenhower’s infamous quip about Nixon — “Give me a week and I
might think of something” — instead he anointed Bush his successor and Reagan,
unlike Obama, had enough political coattails to get his voter base (or enough
of it) to vote for Bush and elect him. (Four years later, when Bush had to run
on his own record — and after he’d pissed off the easily offended Republican
Right by breaking his “read my lips” promise not to raise taxes — Bush lost.)

The segment on Mitt Romney featured interviews with him and with people who
knew him who said he was one of the most charitable people they’d ever known,
and resented the way he was caricatured by the Obama campaign as an insensitive
rich guy who gloried in putting people out of work to boost his own bottom
line. That was somewhat unfair to
Romney — whose record as a hedge-fund entrepreneur revealed not so much a glory
in putting people out of work (it’s hard to imagine Romney hosting The
Apprentice and getting such sick joy out of
telling someone every week, “You’re … FIRED!”) as a total indifference to it. The mission of
Romney as head of Bain Capital was to maximize shareholder value in the enterprises
he took over, and if that meant boosting them with new capital and hiring more
people, he would do that. If it meant drastically cutting them back and firing
people, he would do that. If it meant dismantling the company completely and
selling off its assets, thereby leaving everyone who’d worked for it out of a job, he would do that.
As Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone during the 2012 campaign, “Mitt Romney, it
turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street’s greed revolution. He’s not
a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He’s not a sighing,
eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same
things those guys believe: He’s been right with them on the front lines of the
financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple,
let’s-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new,
highly complex, let’s-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of
cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDO’s and other toxic financial products.
Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank
loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight
and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer
economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly
euphemistic concept of ‘creative destruction,’ and amounted to a total
abdication of collective responsibility by America’s rich, whose new thing was
making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest,
sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories
their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by
a true prairie fire of debt.”

And, like Donald Trump, Romney was a true
practitioner of Orwellian doublethink, being able to square his take-no-prisoners tactics in the
business world with his faith, and in particular his sense of obligation under
his Mormon religion to reach out to individual poor people and volunteer for
charities to help people in need. In fact, a lot of people who called Romney a
hypocrite for practicing individual charities while proposing to decimate the
social safety net and lambasting the “47% of the people who will vote for the
president no matter what … who are dependent upon government, who believe that
they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for
them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing,
to you name it,” missed the point. The Libertarian ethos to which both Romney and his 2012 running mate,
now-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, subscribe holds that it is morally wrong to
tax successful people in order to fund government programs aimed at helping
not-so-successful people, and instead the not-so-successful people should be
helped by churches and other organizations funded by voluntary contributions. So Romney saw no contradiction between
helping people through his church and calling for radical cutbacks in
government social programs because, as a good Libertarian and a good Mormon, he believes the job of helping the less
fortunate should be entirely private. One other fascinating thing about Mitt
Romney in this program was the comment of one of the talking heads that he was
a rich person who looked like the
public image of a rich person, and that turned a lot of non-rich people off of
voting for him. It’s an interesting comment precisely because it shows why
Donald Trump has been able to run a far more competitive race that Mitt Romney
and has a real shot at winning: Trump is a rich person who doesn’t look like a rich person and certainly doesn’t talk like
one. Romney’s public persona was a
gentleman; Trump’s is a thug, and to his core supporters — all those white
working-class men who, ironically, have been undone economically by the kinds
of business tactics Romney and his generation of rich people have been pulling
and who see Trump not as another rich
person who’s screwing them over, but as one of them, with his truculent manner, his unashamed racism and
sexism, and his bravado and braggadocio. Indeed, as I’ve written in these pages
before, the appalling glitzy tastelessness of Trump’s buildings is itself a key
source of his appeal; people — the kinds of people who would vote for him,
anyway — look at them and say, “That’s what I would do if I had his kind of money.”

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Two nights ago Charles and I watched the next Abbott and
Costello film in sequence in the boxed set of all 28 of their feature films for
Universal (which is all but eight of their total), a 1949 production rather
awkwardly titled Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff. Though they had made two other films between their
big comeback, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and this — Mexican Hayride and Africa Screams (the latter not for Universal but for a short-lived
company called Nassour Films) — this was the obvious follow-up, dragging the
comedy team into contact with another icon of horror. It was also largely an
accidental teaming; according to various “trivia” posters on imdb.com, the
script (by Hugh Wedlock, Jr. — the last time I saw his name on the writing
credits of a film I inevitably joked that its script was “out of Wedlock” — and
Howard Snyder, with additional dialogue by John Grant, A&C’s go-to guy for
“Who’s on First”-style wordplay) was originally called Easy Does It and written as a vehicle for Bob Hope. (This makes us
wonder whether Easy Does It was
originally owned by Paramount, Hope’s home studio, and then sold to Universal
when Hope turned it down; or whether it was written at Universal in hopes they
could get Hope on a loan-out and then given to A&C when they couldn’t.
Sometimes movie-industry politics got as Byzantine as real-world politics.) The
original version contained a female character, a phony mystic named “Madame
Switzer,” and the character was retained when the script was rewritten for
Abbott and Costello — until five days before shooting, when
Universal-International signed Karloff for the film and changed “Madame
Switzer” to “Swami Talpur.” What they didn’t do is give Karloff much to do: he gets two scenes
with Lou Costello — a brief one at the beginning in which Costello’s character
sees him through a window and Karloff hypnotizes him and tells him, “You never saw
me. I’m not here” (whereupon Costello says to Abbott, “I never saw him.” “Who?”
“The guy that wasn’t there”) and a longer one in which he’s trying, as part of
a murder plot, to hypnotize Costello into committing suicide. It’s a genuinely
funny scene, particularly when an exasperated Karloff tells Costello, “You’re
going to kill yourself if it’s the last thing you ever do!,” but as rangy as
Karloff was as an actor he doesn’t really pull off “master hypnotist” as well
as his rival as Hollywood’s top horror actor of the time, Bela Lugosi.
Universal also included Lenore Aubert, whose great bad-woman performance had done
so much to liven up Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and once again cast her as a woman trying to seduce
Costello to exploit him for a sinister plot, but they didn’t give her much
screen time, either!

What remains of Abbott and Costello Meet the
Killer, Boris Karloff (the ultimate
red-herring gimmick because, as just about everyone who’s written about this
film never fails to reveal, Karloff’s character is not the mystery killer), is an O.K. comedy-mystery
centered around an isolated resort hotel — not in Florida, as in Abbott
and Costello Meet Frankenstein, but in
California, the Lost Caverns Hotel, in an area where the key tourist attraction
is a set of caves full of stalactites and stalagmites as well as a big pit of
boiling sulfur well below the rest of it. (Caves like that are more associated
with Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada than California, and it’s highly unusual
for one to contain a pit of burning sulfur, but Universal was obviously
recycling the set from the end of Son of Frankenstein, made a decade earlier.) Casey Edwards (Bud Abbott)
is the hotel’s house detective and Freddie Phillips (Lou Costello) is the
bellboy, and in the opening scene Freddie gets into trouble when, assigned to
carry the bags of attorney Amos Strickland (Nicholas Joy) — including heavy
bags as well as a set of golf clubs Freddie spills all over the hotel lobby
floor — and screws it up, Strickland demands that the hotel manager fire him.
The manager does so, and for the rest of the movie Freddie hangs around the hotel
and gets himself into more and more trouble, exasperating Casey, who naturally
thinks that his job will be the
next to go. Needless to say, the next thing that happens is Strickland gets
murdered, and Freddie is the one who discovers the body — and makes himself the
prime suspect by handling the gun with which Strickland was shot. The gun’s
owner, Mike Relia (Vincent Renno, who’s at the bottom of the on-screen credits
list even though we get to see quite a lot of him, mostly after he’s supposed
to be dead), is also quickly murdered, as is Strickland’s private secretary,
Gregory Milford (Morgan Farley). Figuring they’ll be suspected of these two new
murders as well as Strickland’s, Casey and Freddie hide Relia’s body in a
laundry cart and Freddie dresses in drag to pose as a hotel maid so it will
look normal that (s)he should be pushing a laundry cart. While in maid-drag
Freddie is accosted by a queeny middle-aged man named Abernathy (Percy Helton),
and Freddie’s growing horror as he realizes that Abernathy is interested in him
(her) makes this one of the most screamingly funny scenes in a film that, while
it’s generally amusing throughout, really doesn’t have that many laugh-out-loud
sequences.

It seems that Strickland’s visit to the Lost Cavern Hotel attracted
the attention of a lot of people
with various grievances against him, including Swami Talpur and Angela Carter
(who are in cahoots on a scheme to frame Freddie for Strickland’s murder),
including some of his former clients, like Relia and T. Hanley Brooks (Roland
Winters, the last Charlie Chan in the long-running series that continued at two
studios from 1930 to 1949), who fear that Strickland is going to expose them in
his forthcoming memoirs. (Apparently none of the writers had heard of
attorney-client privilege; in the real world it would be illegal for an
attorney to write the sort of book his ex-clients are afraid of.) The film’s
gimmick is that both Relia and Milford move around a lot more once they’re dead
than they seemed to when they were alive — in that regard this film anticipates
Alfred Hitchcock’s oddball movie The Trouble with Harry from 1955, six years later, though an otherwise
useless and awful World War II espionage movie called Spy Train, made by Monogram in 1943, did the mobile-corpse bit
even six years before Universal pulled it with Abbott and Costello in this
film! Casey and Phillips go to all the trouble of pushing the laundry cart
around with Relia’s body in it to Relia’s room, where they intend to put it on
a shelf in Relia’s closet, only it rolls off the shelf and back into the cart,
unbeknownst to Our Heroes (though one would think they’d notice that the cart
had suddenly got a lot heavier than it would be if it just had dirty sheets and
towels in it), and by the end of their travels the cart has both Relia’s and Milford’s bodies in it. Casey and
Phillips get the idea of hiding them out in the card room, setting Relia and
Milford up as if they were two members of a bridge foursome, and when someone
invades the card room and starts kibitzing they explain their total lack of
movement by saying, “They’re in dummy.” (This would make sense, I suppose, if
you were a bridge player.) According to one of the imdb.com “trivia” posters,
this scene got the film banned in Denmark for a time.

I remember when I was
first watching the Abbott and Costello movies on Channel 7, the local ABC
affiliate in San Francisco that ran a comedy series every Sunday morning that
alternated between A&C, the Marx Brothers (mostly their later films, alas)
and Laurel and Hardy — and originally ran them relatively complete in a
90-minute time slot but later shredded them to keep them down to a one-hour
slot — this one threw me because it had pretensions to being a horror-comedy
but was really just a pretty uninteresting murder mystery with Abbott, Costello
and Karloff grafted onto it. This time it seemed a lot better, and as odd as
that final scene’s setting is, at least it’s genuinely exciting, with
Strickland’s business manager, Melton (Alan Mowbray — well, that should have made it obvious!), turning out to be the
killer, though he spends most of the sequence covered by one of those white
hoods that would seem to be effective only in cutting down his field of vision.
While hardly at the level of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein or the early-1940’s films that made Abbott and
Costello’s reputation in the first place, Abbott and Costello Meet
the Killer, Boris Karloff is an engaging
little movie and a pleasant time-filler for its 94-minute running time (two
minutes longer than Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and quite a bit longer than most of their films,
which were kept to the standard 75-minute length for a feature comedy from a
relatively cheap studio like Universal, even in its post-1947 “-International”
incarnation: it had absorbed Bill Goetz’s International Pictures to get beyond
its “B” image and crack Hollywood’s first tier of movie companies, though it
didn’t actually make it to the studio “A” list until Lew Wasserman’s MCA took
it over in the early 1960’s and started shelling out to attract “A”-list stars
like Gregory Peck and serious prestige projects like To Kill a
Mockingbird).

At 10 p.m. last night I watched an odd show on KPBS, Royal Wives at
War, obviously shown as a “filler” because
their usual programming schedule was screwed up by the Presidential debate. It
was an oddball take on the British royal crisis of 1936, when David, a.k.a.
King Edward VIII (an unwittingly funny bit in the show depicts his investiture
as King and features an announcer reading off his entire list of given names,
Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David), decided to abdicate the
throne because “I could not faithfully discharge my duties as King without the
help and support of the woman I love,” and his younger and considerably less
charismatic brother, Bertie a.k.a. King George VI, took over. As the title
suggests, the show was about the confrontation between the two women involved,
American divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson, Edward’s inamorata, with whom he started an affair in 1933 while she
was still married to husband number two; and Elizabeth Angela Marguerite
Bowes-Lyon, George VI’s wife, who since she lived to be 101 (she died in 2002,
50 years after her husband) and her daughter, also named Elizabeth, assumed the
throne, became known as the Queen Mother to distinguish her from the other
Queen Elizabeth who’s the current reigning monarch. This was one of those
peculiar modern semi-documentaries which alternated talking-heads footage of
three biographers who’ve written about various members of the Royal Family —
including Andrew Morton, Lady Colin Campbell (her birth name was Georgia
Arianna Ziadie) and Anne Sebba (whose over-permed blonde hair gives her an odd
look, sort of a combination Dolly Parton and one of the Trump bimbos) — with
dramatic re-enactments of the key incidents in the story, with Nick Waring as
Edward VIII, John Sackville as George VI, Gina McKee as Wallis Simpson (she
does a considerably more convincing American accent than most British actors
who attempt one) and Emma Davies, formidable as all get-out, as Elizabeth the
Queen Mother. Davies even looks
much like the current Queen, enough that she’s quite credible as her mother. The
modern biographers analyze the abdication and the political pressure that
forced Edward VIII to choose between his fiancée and the throne almost
exclusively at face value and ignore the more recent scholarship that suggests
the crisis was largely stage-managed behind the scenes by Winston Churchill,
who was less afraid of Edward VIII’s infatuation with Wallis Simpson than of
his infatuation with Adolf Hitler.

The show includes footage of Edward and
Wallis, created Duke and Duchess of Windsor but without the right to use
“H.R.H.” in front of their names (a bit of protocol that was insanely important
to the Queen Mother; according to the Wikipedia page on Edward VIII, George VI
was originally inclined to let Edward and Wallis call themselves “H.R.H.” but his
wife was fiercely opposed to it and spent decades making sure they didn’t), visiting Germany in 1937
(after their wedding in France had been attended by only seven people because
the Queen Mother had decreed that anyone who went to it would never be received
by the Royal Family again) and getting himself photographed with Adolf Hitler.
It’s also well known that in 1940 Hitler sent emissaries to Edward, then
uncomfortably ensconced in his appointment as governor-general of Bermuda,
which he hated, to see if Edward would be interested in returning to England as
nominal monarch if and when Hitler conquered it; Edward was noncommittal,
though this show suggests he sounded out friends to ask them if the British,
who had turned him down as king, would accept him as ruler, but of course the
Nazis never invaded, much less conquered, Britain, so the whole thing remained
academic. What the show didn’t acknowledge was that as part of his
“forward-looking” approach to governance and his lifestyle, which embraced American
women (whom he found generally freer, more assertive and generally more fun
than the comparatively strait-laced women of his homeland), American clothes
and American jazz music, Edward was also interested in fascism and was one of
the many conservative Brits of his day who looked upon regimes like Mussolini’s
and Hitler’s as the coming thing. For his part, Hitler never wanted a war with Britain — he regarded the Brits as
the other half of the Aryan “master race” along with the Germans, and he wanted
them on his side against the “inferior” Slavs in general and Russians in
particular — though he got stuck with one, and he seemed to think that it was
the abdication and the political machinations of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin
(and of Churchill, who in the 1930’s was nominally just another back-bench M.P.
but who had formidable aristocratic and government connections as well as a
secret line to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt — because Churchill had been
First Lord of the Admiralty and Roosevelt Assistant Secretary of the Navy
during World War I, their letters to each other were addressed “Former Naval
Person” — because Churchill knew Hitler would have to be stopped and an
alliance between Britain and the U.S. would be necessary to stop him) that made
Britain one of his enemies instead of one of his allies in World War II. Hitler
saw Edward VIII as a potential friend and ally, and because of the abdication
he was replaced by the anti-Nazi George VI instead.

In fairness’ sake I’ll
quote the last part of the Wikipedia page on Edward VIII, which seeks to
challenge the idea that the abdication was brought about by political pressures
and Wallis Simpson’s status as a divorcée was simply an excuse by Baldwin and
Churchill to bring down the fascist-sympathizing Edward: “In the view of
historians such as Philip Williamson, the popular perception today that the
abdication was driven by politics rather than religious morality is false, and
arises because divorce has become much more common and socially acceptable. To modern
sensibilities, the religious restrictions that prevented Edward from continuing
as king while married to Simpson ‘seem, wrongly, to provide insufficient
explanation’ for his abdication.” Since then we’ve seen this same prissy Royal
morality (remember that the monarch of England is also essentially the “pope”
of the Anglican church) in the current Queen Elizabeth refusing to let her son
Prince Charles marry Camilla Parker-Bowles because she had been divorced, and insisting he marry Diana
Spencer instead — a choice she no doubt later regretted big-time! (Both Andrew
Morton and Lady Colin Campbell have written biographies of “Princess Di.”) And
even when Charles was free to marry Camilla after all following Diana’s divorce
and death, Elizabeth insisted — as her mom had with Wallis Simpson — that she
could not use the “H.R.H.” title if and when Charles became King. (Given how
much longer-lived the Windsor women have been than the Windsor men, I’m
convinced that Charles will predecease his mom and his older son with Diana,
Prince William, will be Britain’s next monarch.) Still, given that America
stands a good chance of electing a twice-divorced man as its next President
(after having had only one once-divorced
previous President, Ronald Reagan), and also given that the narrators described
both Edward and George as
relatively weak men married to relatively strong women (a charge that was often
made about Bill Clinton when he
was President), it was ironic indeed to be watching this just two hours after
the conclusion of the first Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump!

Sunday, September 25, 2016

I’ve generally avoided Lifetime’s
forays into ghost stories and haunted-house tales, but last night they were
offering a “world premiere” of a film called House of Darkness and I thought I’d give it a chance. It was directed by
Patrick DeLuca from a script by … well, I don’t know, because I missed the
opening credits and imdb.com’s page on it doesn’t yet list a writer, so I don’t
know either who to credit for the occasional felicitous touches in the script
or blame for the sillinesses and outrageous devices, including an open-ended
ending of a kind that about 20 or 30 years ago would have seemed innovative but
now is annoyingly clichéd. It opens with a scene on Hallowe’en in 1957, in
which two trick-or-treaters approach a house in a remote rural area of northern
California, get invited in, the door closes — and suddenly we hear them scream.
Then the time moves up to July 2015, and the house is occupied by a young
(straight) couple from San Francisco, Brian (Gunner Wright) and Kelly (Sara
Fletcher). They already have a daughter, Sarah (Mykayla Sohn), but Kelly wants
another child — only Brian, a carpenter and cabinetmaker, is such a workaholic
he’s never home long enough for the two to have sex. Brian sells her on the
idea of moving to the country by telling her they’ll be more alone, there will
be fewer urban-related distractions and therefore more time for the “adult
nights” they need to complete the sex act and conceive already.

Their marriage
is already on the rocks — they’ve been seeing a marriage therapist in San
Francisco (a heavy-set avuncular African-American woman, reflecting Lifetime’s
tendency to cast Blacks in the roles of all-wise authority figures trying to
deter the white characters from doing the stupid things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all) but they
won’t be able to keep seeing her once they move hundreds of miles away, so she
tells them to keep video journals by talking to their computers at night and
gives Brian a yellow squeeze-ball with a smiley-face on it to squeeze whenever
he gets stressed. One of the big issues in their marriage is that Kelly works
as a massage therapist, and Brian is ferociously jealous that she’ll get
hot-looking male customers, lose control completely and thereby have sex with them (and I can imagine the defense I would have written for
her if I’d been writing this: “If you’d
have sex with me once in a while, I wouldn’t need another guy to father my next
child!”). At one point the couple are visited by Kelly’s sister Jamie (Brittany
Falardeau), who brings along her son Mason (Thomas Rand), who’s about Kelly’s
age — Jamie lives back in San Francisco with her husband Mark, whom we never
see — and already things have started to happen to establish the house’s
“hauntedicity.” Kelly has been scared to death by an apparition that turns out
to be her daughter Sarah putting a sheet over her head and pretending to be a
ghost — only she sees the apparition later when it’s not her daughter — and when they’re playing together Mason
goes into the basement and then the door closes behind him; Sarah is accused of
locking her in but she didn’t — some sort of sinister force did. Brian starts
getting more jealous and more violent; he accuses Kelly’s sister Jamie of
having a sexual quickie with Clark (Raphael Thompson), the hot Black stud who’s
their next-door neighbor and is also the community’s chief law enforcement
officer (and when we see Clark leaving Brian’s and Kelly’s home dressed in
nothing above the waist and only a pair of skin-tight long johns below it, it’s
hard not to think there’s some justice
behind Brian’s suspicions). “You cheated on your husband, and you did it in our
home!” Brian thunders at Jamie, who
responds by packing up Mason and leaving.

Meanwhile Brian has an affair of his
own with Clark’s wife Ellen (Nikki Alexis Howard) — or at least a quickie on
the floor of the garage he’s converted into his wood shop and where he’s
spending his nights making cabinets and tables for the locals; Ellen had been
flirting with him from the moment he and Kelly got there and she left them a
freshly baked pie. Though Gunner Wright is considerably hotter-looking than the
usual tall, lanky, sandy-haired actor Lifetime usually picks as their male
leads (he’s shorter than their norm but also considerably more muscular), one still gets the impression Ellen is trading down by cheating on
Clark with him — and it’s not terribly
surprising that Brian’s actions get progressively crazier as the film goes on,
to the point where he’s alternately shown wielding sharp objects like axes,
knives and chisels, and locking them in a locker in his workshop and literally
throwing away the key so he can’t get to them if he’s tempted to use them.
That’s a hot man in a Lifetime movie for you: they almost always turn out to be
the villains. At the same time director DeLuca is giving us plenty of shots of
Sarah with her eyes glaring at the camera and the other cast members, making us
wonder if the unnamed writer(s) planned to pull the gimmick of having the
whatsit that’s haunting the house take possession of her and have her start
knocking off the rest of the cast — the scenes with Sarah and her cousin Mason
had elements of The Turn of the Screw
and the later scenes with Sarah alone, casting all those burning glares, call
to mind The Bad Seed — but at the end
the gimmick turns out to be a pretty prosaic one: the action we saw in the
first scene (which I missed on the first go-round but caught up with at
Lifetime’s midnight rerun of the film) is that the high-school principal lived
in that house and was a decent, normal, fully respected member of that
community until he went berserk that Hallowe’en night in 1957 and molested,
tortured and murdered those two trick-or-treaters — who remained on the grounds
as ghosts, determined to get the people who lived in the house subsequently to
murder each other so the ghosts, who feed on other people’s pain and death,
could be happy by making everyone else miserable. It ends with the house
catching fire and burning down — Kelly and Sarah get out safely but Brian,
trapped in his workshop, burns up and dies — and it looks like we’re going to
have a happy ending with Kelly and Sarah returning to San Francisco and the
urban life they were both more comfortable with, only a Latino-looking police
officer (who seems to be the only law
enforcement person besides Clark in the whole town!) interrogates her and comes
to the conclusion that Kelly actually set the fire and murdered her husband for
the $3 million in life insurance they had on each other.

We don’t get to find
out what happens to her — whether she is exonerated or locked up in prison like
the last woman who lived in that house, who under the influence of the evil
spirits haunting it killed her entire family by feeding them rat poison (Kelly
actually interviewed her in prison and she said her phone rang and snapped her
away from doing that, but somehow the ghosts got to her family anyway and they
ate the poisoned meal, which she’d already thrown away, and died) — but instead
there’s a final scene with yet another husband, wife and daughter moving into
the house (which, though totally consumed by the fire, must have been rebuilt
to the same design because it looks identical only now it’s painted brown instead
of white), and the daughter, who’s something of a punk because she has long
black hair, wears black lipstick and is dressed in a black leather suit like
the ones Patti Smith used to wear on her album covers, is glaring at the camera
the same way Sarah used to, indicating that the ghosts from the basement are
still haunting the place and are going to get this family, too. Oh, and did I mention that at one point Kelly
calls in a psychic who tells them that the basement is actually the one place
in the house where Sarah is safe from
the ghosts (this is after a scene in which Sarah disappears and they find her inside the house’s walls, with no rational explanation of how she
got there), only when she gets in her car to leave, it fills with quite nasty
stinging insects and she’s lucky to get out of there alive? Through much of
this movie I was counterpointing it with the old film I’d seen recently, Victor
Halperin’s Supernatural (1933), and
thinking that Supernatural was an
example of how to do a credible ghost story with a contemporary (for the time
it was made) setting and House of Darkness was an example of how not to —
that’s being a little harsher on House
of Darkness than it deserves, since at
least it’s well acted (especially by the leads) and much of it well staged by
director DeLuca — though I could have done without the long time-lapse montages
to get us from night to day where a classic-era director would have just cut
from one to the other. I didn’t actively dislike this movie but I didn’t like
it that much either!

After House of Darkness Lifetime changed tone dramatically (something they usually
don’t do on their Saturday night prime-time movie double bills!) and showed The
Ugly Truth, which turned out not to be a Lifetime TV-movie but a feature film from 2009,
made at Sony’s Columbia studio (and with a title strikingly reminiscent of The
Awful Truth, Columbia’s screwball comedy
classic from 1937) and a genuine, if not altogether successful, attempt to
revive the screwball comedy in the modern era. Directed by Robert Luketic
(whose last name sounds more like an electroplating process than a person) from
a script by Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith, The Ugly Truth stars Katherine Heigl as Abby Richter, producer of a
low-rated news/talk show on a local TV station in Sacramento. Her show is
bombing in the ratings, and the station manager — who worked there when it was
family-owned and, like Abby, is having to adjust to the new management of the
big media corporation that just bought it — is badgering her for ideas on how
to boost ratings. One night Abby is at home when her cat steps on the TV
remote, accidentally turning it on to “The Ugly Truth,” a public-access cable
show hosted by a male-chauvinist pig named Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler, before
he started making the … Has Fallen
movies and saving the life of the President of the United States from
terrorists in every one).

Chadway’s schtick is attacking women on the air; he takes calls from them
and when they call him out, or try to, on his view of women as manipulative
bitches who will lead men around their little fingers just for the hint of an
offer of sex, he uses sound-effects machines to ridicule them and ultimately
hangs up on them. (Rush Limbaugh’s show began in Sacramento and he pulled
similar stunts on women callers, announcing he was about to perform a “caller
abortion” and then playing a sound effect of a flushing toilet as he hung up on
them.) Unfortunately, the station manager also discovers Chadway and
immediately hires him, whereupon his antics boost the ratings of Abby’s show
while making her physically ill because she wanted to do a serious news program
and instead she’s airing footage of Chadway wrestling half-naked women in
Jell-O and making salacious comments on how good they taste. From the moment we
see the hate-at-first-sight between Chadway and Abby we just know — at least if we’ve seen more than about 12 movies in our
lives — that they’re going to end up together as a couple at the fade-out, but
the writers and director Luketic take their sweet time getting us there as they
offer us another suitor for Abby, Dr. Colin Anderson (Eric Winter, who isn’t as
self-consciously butch as Gerard Butler but frankly did more for me), who’s not only handsome but nice, intellectual, well-to-do
(they meet when Abby injures herself climbing a tree after her cat and Colin
just happens to come upon her — they’re
next-door neighbors — and bandages her ankle) and meets all the 10 points on
her checklist of what she wants in a man — something for which Michael
ridicules her, saying that the only men who would meet all 10 points are Gay.
(I remember articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and other local papers in the late 1970’s that young
straight women in the city had two sets of boyfriends: the upper-middle-class
Gay men who would take them to concerts, musea and other refined intellectual
events, and the proletarians they would need if they actually wanted their
ashes hauled.)

Michael makes a deal with Abby: if she’ll follow his instructions
exactly on how to court Colin, he will
quit the station if she can’t get Colin to have sex with her. Accordingly Abby
lets Michael wire her ear so he can follow her and Colin on their dates and
give his smirking advice in real time — at one point he tells her, when she and
Colin are at a baseball game, to eat her hot dog slowly and sensually
(obviously to suggest that this is how she would go down on Colin if he gave
her the chance), and while she attempts to do that the hot dog flies out of its
bun and creates a crisis where she spills a drink on Colin’s lap, then tries to
clean it up — and a hidden camera at the ballpark broadcasts the incident on
the Jumbotron (Sacramento’s minor-league team must have been playing a
particularly boring game that night) and it does look like she’s going down on him then and there. There’s
also a sequence in which Michael buys Abby a pair of panties with a
remote-controlled vibrator attached — he’s told her that she needs to start
masturbating so her body will once again know what sex feels like and therefore
she’ll be able to respond to the real deal — only she’s summoned to a meeting
with executives of the corporation who bought her station, and in the middle of
their dinner meeting Michael’s obnoxious nephew (his sister’s son, whom he
baby-sits for frequently and who seems to be the only person he actually loves
in any sense) steals the remote, starts
playing with it and sends Abby, in the middle of a work-related dinner, into
her first orgasm in years. It all comes to a head (so to speak) at a conference
in Los Angeles — this is on the weekend when Abby and Colin were supposed to go
to Lake Tahoe and actually get it on after all the dating — instead Michael
suggests that Abby bring him along on the conference and they can be alone in
their hotel room after it’s over but before they go back — only Abby loses all
her self-control and slobbers all over Michael in the hotel elevator, thereby
confirming our movie-conditioned expectations that she’s going to end up not with the nice-guy doc but the male-chauvinist boor she’s
been resisting, personally and
professionally, all movie.

The climax occurs during a big balloon race Abby’s
station is covering (Michael has left for a competing station and Abby has
hired a replacement who’s even worse, and she pulls him off the air when he
makes a remark that seems to be approving of rape), only Abby and Michael end
up in the same balloon and can’t get away from each other. Needless to say, it
wasn’t hard for me to figure out how this would have been cast in the classic
era — my putative 1930’s version would have had Carole Lombard as Abby, Clark
Gable as Michael and Ralph Bellamy (who else?) as Colin — and it would have
been considerably subtler (thanks to the Production Code) and also considerably
funnier; Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler aren’t bad casting for these old-movie characters now (though Butler
looked considerably more at home as an action hero in the … Has Fallen movies), and though there are some nice touches (like
Michael being interviewed by Craig Ferguson — playing himself — and being
momentarily nonplussed when Ferguson plays his game on him, asking him point-blank who was the woman who
hurt him so much it left him with such a low opinion of women in general) in
the script, for the most part it’s a pale copy of the screamingly funny
originals for this sort of movie from the 1930’s. And yet, as annoying as it
got sometimes (particularly in the characterization of Michael — one imdb.com
contributor thought the writers should have made the boy Michael’s son instead
of his nephew and had him raising the boy as a single father after the mother
had left him, which would have added humanity and pathos to Butler’s
characterization), The Ugly Truth was
also reasonably amusing and a breath of fresh air, both figuratively and
literally (given how much of it takes place either outdoors or in well-lit
interiors), after the oppressive gloom of House of Darkness!

Saturday, September 24, 2016

Last night I watched the latest rerun
of Live at the Belly Up, the
local KPBS music program paying tribute to the legendary live music venue in
Solana Beach (where I’ve never been because attending late-night events in such
a far out-of-the-way location would be utterly impossible for me
transportation-wise) which opened in 1974 and where these shows were filmed in
2014. I was interested in this episode because one of the featured acts was
Earl Thomas and the RhumBoogies, a reunion of a band that played a lot at the
Belly Up in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, and I was interested not only
because I generally like the kind of music Earl Thomas plays and sings (he was
featured here only as a vocalist, though I believe he plays guitar as well) —
classic rhythm-and-blues (though the RhumBoogies’ promotional slogan, as
painted on their drummer’s bass-drum head, is “All kinds of blues … All night
long”), which in a brief interview segment Thomas said he and his bandmates
study and take as seriously as classical musicians take the music they play — but because I knew him briefly when he came
to a few meetings of a group I was hosting in the early 2000’s. I also know
he’s Gay — he was once featured in a San Diego Reader article about Black Gay men (along with Jonathan
Thomas, whom I also knew and who was in a wheelchair, though he was still very cute) — which made it odd, to say the least, to
hear him singing lyrics about loving (or being attracted to, or having sex
with) women. I’m not sure whether Thomas’s songs were originals or covers of
relatively obscure R&B songs — two of his songs, “Stand by Me” and “That’s
the Stuff You Gotta Watch,” have the same titles as major hits but were not the
same songs. One song he did definitely was a cover — Earl King’s 1960 “Come On (Let the Good Times Roll),” which
added to the confusion because there are at least three songs with that title
(the others are the one by Louis Jordan which he had a hit on in 1946 and Ray
Charles covered beautifully in 1959 for his The Genius of Ray Charles album, and the one by Sam Theard which was
introduced by Shirley and Lee in 1956 and done to a turn by Phoebe Snow on her
first album in 1975), and which didn’t make the R&B charts when King first
recorded it for Imperial in 1960 but made it into the standard blues-soul-rock
repertory when Jimi Hendrix covered it for the 1968 double album Electric
Ladyland. (Later King re-recorded
the song in 1977 and apparently incorporated some of Hendrix’ licks.)

The other
songs Earl Thomas performed on his Belly Up TV appearance were “Taking Care of
Business” (another oft-used title better known for a different song than the
one Thomas did), “Everything’s Gonna Be All Right” (the slowest song Thomas did
and the one that showed off the most soul in his voice), and “Keep On Loving
Me, Baby.” The show’s closing credits designated one of his two guitar players
as “lead” and one as “rhythm,” but in fact they traded off those functions and
both of them played quite beautiful solos throughout the evening. The entire
band, except for Thomas himself, was white — though one of the guitarists might have been Black (he had dark skin and curly hair
but his facial features looked white) — and they featured a sax player who
played baritone on the opener, “Stand by Me,” but tenor on the rest of the
songs. This music was a lot of fun and helped make up for the opening act, a
rock band called Stripes and Lines which was good but not especially “special”
— their drummer is also their lead singer and they kept reminding me of U2
(especially early U2, before they started
their heavy use of techno and industrial effects and The Edge started running
his guitar through an effects box to make it sound like a synthesizer),
probably more because of the uncanny resemblance of their singer’s voice to
Bono’s than that much similarity instrumentally. The Belly Up announcer who
introduced them compared them to 1970’s punk groups like Club Fugazi, but I
don’t hear them that way (just as I don’t hear the resemblance between Earl
Thomas and Al Green he claimed); I liked them but they didn’t move me the way
Earl Thomas and the RhumBoogies did, partly because they’re a good band but
they didn’t really have much to say about the music — there are hundreds of
other bands out there that sound just like them — and partly because all six
songs they played on this show were in similar tempi and sounded a lot like
each other. The one that stood out for me was “Slave to a New Drug,” though I
couldn’t make out enough of the words to be clear on whether it was intended as
an anti-drug song or was just using drugs as a metaphor for an obsessive
romance. Frankly, enough rock songs have glamorized and encouraged drug use
that I’m always glad to stumble on one that goes the other way!

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Charles and I watched the second episode in PBS’s compelling
The Contenders: 16 for ’16 eight-part
mini-series, each of which profiles two people who ran for President in recent
years (though “recent,” at least so far, has extended as far back as Shirley
Chisholm’s run in 1972). This time the candidates were Howard Dean (the brief
Democratic front-runner in 2004) and Patrick Buchanan (who ran three times — as
a Republican in 1992 and 1996 and as the Reform Party nominee in 2000), linked
as allegedly being “The Flamethrowers,” using particularly incendiary rhetoric
that appealed to their parties’ bases and sought to arouse indignation against
the Establishment that would propel them to victory. Much of the Dean portion
of the episode stressed the pioneering work he and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi,
did in discovering and using the political potential of the Internet — at a
time when social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist and
virtually everyone who used a computer viewed the screen on a cathode-ray tube
monitor, a visual detail which vividly dates this footage. They were able to
raise large amounts of money — in one spit-in-your-eye response to the Bush
administration, they did a major Internet fundraising drive the night Dick
Cheney was headlining a fundraiser for large donors, and they made twice what
his event did — though it also shows the bizarre “scream” Dean gave after
coming third in the Iowa caucuses and the way it got not only replayed
endlessly on the mainstream media but became the stuff of parody on late-night
TV talk shows. The way the Dean story got blown out of proportion and sank his
candidacy after another third-place finish in New Hampshire is yet more
indication of how the media rig the process of elections in general and
Presidential elections in particular; there’s an interesting column in today’s Los
Angeles Times op-ed section claiming that
if Hillary Clinton loses this year’s election, the media will be largely to
blame. (And we can all remember the way the media rigged the election against
Al Gore in 2000 largely on the same grounds they’re rigging it against Hillary
Clinton now: by constructing a “scenario” that filtered just about all their
coverage through the meme that s/he “couldn’t be trusted.”) What came off most
interestingly about the Contenders
episode on Dean and Buchanan is how much Dean came off as a prototype of Bernie
Sanders — both Vermonters, both with a strenuous and aggressive speaking style,
both taking positions well to the Left of the American mainstream (in
particular, both calling for universal health coverage), and both attracting
most of their early support among disaffected youth struggling not only under
the weight of their student loan debts but looking at a future in which they
would have a lower standard of living and less access to high-paying jobs than
their parents’ generation, and wanting a President who would do something about
that.

Sanders lasted considerably longer in the race than Dean did — though he
succumbed to a problem Dean would have had, too, if he hadn’t flamed out so
early: he never reached large numbers of voters of color. Whatever attempts
were made by the Democratic National Committee and others in the party
establishment in this year’s contest to rig it for Clinton, the decisive factor
that made Hillary Clinton and not Bernie Sanders the Democratic nominee was the
fierce loyalty shown her by the communities of color, especially older people
of color — African-Americans in particular had deserted Hillary in 2008 when
her principal opponent was one of their own, but they came back this year, and
it was Sanders’ inability to find a way to reach beyond the overwhelmingly
white hue of his support base that, more than any other single factor, doomed
his candidacy. Frankly, the Buchanan segment was a lot more interesting than the Dean segment, because
right now Donald Trump is taking over the momentum in this year’s general
election and seems all but certain to win — he’s dead-even in the current polls
(which I suspect understate his support because I think he’s got a reverse
version of the “Bradley factor” working for him — about five percent of the
electorate is racist enough to vote for him but too embarrassed about it to
admit it to a pollster) and he’s definitely gaining, to the point where the
Democrats have stopped talking about a popular-vote victory and their
last-ditch hope is that Clinton will be able to eke out enough statewide wins
to get an Electoral College majority even as she loses the popular vote. The
politics of the Electoral College kept Al Gore from becoming President in 2000
(though as I’ve argued in these pages what really kept Gore from becoming President is the National
Rifle Association, whose “independent” campaigns for George W. Bush in
Tennessee and West Virginia swung those states to Bush — in an otherwise
razor-close race Gore became the first major-party nominee since George
McGovern to lose his home state, and that mattered because if Gore had won
Tennessee he would have been President and Florida wouldn’t have mattered) and
Democrats kvetched about it for
years — and now the Democrats’ final hope of denying Trump the Presidency is to
do him out of a win in the Electoral College even as he carries the popular
vote.

The reason a segment on Pat Buchanan is relevant today is that, even more
than Howard Dean being the beta version of Bernie Sanders, Pat Buchanan is the
beta version of Donald Trump, basing his campaign specifically on opposition to
immigration and so-called “trade” deals, actually using the phrase “America
First” to describe his foreign policy (a phrase with a long and dishonorable
history since it was originally the late-1930’s rallying cry of America’s
Fascist sympathizers and the isolationists who were largely their dupes) and
questioning the interlocking alliances like NATO and its successors with which
the U.S. had essentially assumed the role of policeman of the “Free World” as
the Cold War developed out of World War II. Indeed, one of the things that I
had forgotten (or maybe simply not noticed at the time) about Buchanan’s
speeches on the campaign trail was he did as much railing against the so-called
“free trade” agreements and the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
negotiated by the first President Bush and pushed through a reluctant Congress
by Bill Clinton (thereby making both major parties complicit in the wanton
destruction of American jobs globalization in general andthese “trade”
agreements in particular would precipitate), as he did on the
religious/cultural issues and anti-immigration tirades everyone who remembers
Buchanan at all associates with him. Buchanan’s rallies also anticipated the
Tea Party and the Trump rallies in being overwhelmingly male, white and
middle-aged or older, and when one of the talking heads on this show talked
about Buchanan as “running against demographics,” that too is a line that’s
been used this year to minimize the Trump threat and suggest that future
Presidential politics will trend Democratic as the country becomes less white
and there are more voters of color in the mix. That’s an analysis that’s been
hailed as conventional wisdom for so long it’s motivated the Republican Party
to a counter-strategy that involves deliberately making voting as difficult as
possible so the new demographic groups that would be less likely to vote
Republican won’t be able to vote at all. It’s also been questioned; a recent
article in The American Prospect
suggested that people who are part-Latino and part-Asian tend to identify
themselves as white, and vote the way whites of their socioeconomic class
position do, while those who are part-African-American tend to identify as
Black and vote the way Blacks do.

I also found it amusing that one of the
talking heads (it may have been the same one) proclaimed that Buchanan was
running for President to restore an America dominated by white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants — when Buchanan himself was an Irish Catholic, which just goes to
show how far the various prejudices English and Nordic whites in the U.S. once
had against Irish, Italians, Slavs and others they deemed “racially inferior”
even if they were, by modern standards, “white” have been subsumed into an
overall generic “white” category seen as threatened by rising numbers of people
of color in the U.S. as well as the American corporate leaders’ mass exports of
jobs abroad and the hiring of immigrants of color to do the jobs (like
agricultural work, construction and health care) they can’t ship abroad. It also shows how doctrinal differences
among Right-wing Christians have been subsumed to the point where to identify
yourself as a “Christian” in a political context almost always means you’re a
Right-wing Christian, an opponent of women’s right to reproductive choice,
Queer rights in general, the theory of evolution and the notion that humans
have anything to do with climate change. (Liberal Christians who get
politically involved — or even ones who don’t — tend, when asked what religion
they are, to specify which denomination they affiliate with instead of just
calling themselves “Christian.”) Nonetheless, watching a show about Pat
Buchanan today raised the alarums about Trump and suggested that Trump is to
Buchanan what Ronald Reagan was to Barry Goldwater — the candidate who was able
to take the same basic issue positions and package them into a more palatable
form that, in an election with a lot of alienated voters desperate for “change”
and seeing the Democratic nominee as the very personification of the
Establishment they want “change” from, will succeed where Buchanan failed and win not only the major-party
nomination (which Trump has already done) but the election itself (which he’s
well on his way to doing).

Yesterday I got two DVD’s
on order from the Turner Classic Movies Web site, includingone I’ve wanted an official video of
for quite some time: Supernatural (1933), a Paramount production (though, like most of Paramount’s
1929-1949 output, now owned by Universal) produced by Edward Halperin and
directed by his brother Victor, the people who had made White Zombie with Bela Lugosi and Madge Bellamy the year
before. White Zombie had
originally been just another horror indie destined for the 1932 equivalent of
grind houses, but United Artists was short of a film for their distribution
schedule and picked it up. The result was a lot more people noticed it than
would have if it hadn’t had the boost of at least a semi-major studio, the film
was a success and Paramount decided to sign the Halperins to see if they could
work the same magic at a major studio. The result is usually considered a
disappointment, but when I first saw Supernatural (at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley in 1975
on a triple bill with the 1927 Paul Leni The Cat and the Canary and White Zombie) I thought it was fully the equal of White
Zombie and a fascinating film in
its own right. I’d seen it at least two more times, one (I think) at the Cento
Cedar Cinema in San Francisco and once when the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it
still had a name that meant something instead of the ridiculous concoction
“Syfy”) broadcast it and, despite the commercial breaks, I recorded it onto VHS
tape and shared it with at least one friend who generally didn’t like old
movies but found this one compelling.

Supernatural begins with the credits seen over lightning
flashes while a rather overwrought woo-woo-woo chorus sings on the soundtrack,
and then we get quotes about the supernatural from Confucius (“Treat all supernatural
beings with respect … but keep aloof from them!”), Mohammed (“We will bring
forth the dead from their graves”), and St. Matthew (“ … and He gave his twelve
disciples power against unclean spirits to cast them out”). The last makes
sense because Jesus Christ is actually in this movie … well, at least H. B.
Warner is, and he’d played Jesus in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 King of Kings. Then we get to a New York skyline and a newspaper
clipping announcing the upcoming execution of Ruth Rogen (Vivienne Osborne),
who “yesterday confessed she killed each of her three lovers after a riotous
orgy in her sensuous Greenwich Village apartment” — prose that if nothing else
marks Supernatural as a product of the
so-called “pre-Code” era. Rogen (whose name is pronounced with a soft “g,” by
the way) wants as her last request to see her previous lover, spiritualist Dr.
Paul Bavian (Alan Dinehart, a superb character villain whose two best roles
were this one and as the notorious blackmailer Thaddeus Merridew in the Sherlock
Holmes film A Study in Scarlet, made immediately afterwards), who apparently had an affair with Rogen,
only it ended badly and soured her on all men, leading to the killings for
which she’s about to be put to death. The film is clearly set in the 1933 present,
but when Victor Halperin takes us to Dr. Bavian’s abode we seem to have
suddenly jumped back in time to the 1890’s — the streets are cobblestone, the
only vehicles are horse-drawn, and Bavian himself is living in a ratty little
boarding house run by the slatternly, drunken Madame Gourjian (Beryl Mercer in
a much less gimmicky performance than she usually gave), who in one scene
refers to the cockroaches inhabiting her rooms (if there’s another 1933 movie
that gives you extreme close-ups of cockroaches, I don’t know what it is) as
“my pets” and tries to swat one with her gin bottle, breaking it and forcing
her frantically to look for another container in which she can pour what’s left
of its contents.

Then we cut to the funeral home where John Courtney (who’s
dead at the outset of the story but is shown physically enough — through a
still photo and a recording of his voice — the Halperins needed an actor, Lyman
Williams, to play him) is lying in state after having died mysteriously at age
24. (At first I thought he might have been one of Ruth Rogen’s victims, but he
wasn’t, though the screenwriters — Garnett Weston, Harvey Thew and Brian Marlow
— never quite explain how he did die.) Dr. Bavian sneaks into the deserted viewing room with plaster to
take a death mask of him as part of a plot to swindle his twin sister Roma
Courtney (Carole Lombard, top-billed and delivering a superb performance that
indicates the screen lost a potentially great dramatic actress when the
blockbuster success of the 1934 film Twentieth Century led her to concentrate on screwball comedy),
though just what he intends to do with her
and how he hopes to gain by it remain powerfully ambiguous. We see Roma playing
a homemade record she and John made, and we see their dog fetch John’s slipper
— the dog is obviously still scenting John’s aroma and doesn’t realize he’s
dead — though Roma herself is clearly so overcome by the loss of her brother
(and her twin, at that!) that she’s doing little but wearing black and moping
around the house. It’s established through yet another newspaper clipping that
the Courtneys were multimillionaires and Roma is now the sole heir to the
family fortune (presumably their parents were already dead), though the money
is being managed by the family attorney, Hammond (former silent-screen star
William Farnum). Also on the scene at the Courtney mansion is Dr. Carl Houston
(H. B. Warner), who — fittingly given that in his most famous previous role he
was crucified and then resurrected — is convinced that not only do the dead
remain alive in some other plane of existence, they can return to influence the
living, and in particular dead criminals can return to influence living persons
to commit copycat crimes. To prevent Ruth Rogen from doing this, he requests
that he be given her body after her execution — for which he has to get her
approval, which she gives after a nice peroration in which she repeats that she
hates all men and also asks, “What’s in it for me? This isn’t going to do me any good!” (She has a point.)

Alas, after allowing
Dr. Bavian to hold two séances and supposedly contact her dead brother — which
explains why Bavian sneaked into the funeral home; he needed an accurate
reproduction of John Courtney’s face — in which Bavian’s manufactured “ghost”
of John Courtney says that the attorney Hammond murdered him (actually Bavian
murders both Hammond and his landlady with a trick ring on his finger that
emits a poison-tipped needle) — Roma and her boyfriend Grant Wilson (the young
Randolph Scott, still a utility player at Paramount who hadn’t yet found his niche in Westerns) go to Dr. Houston’s to ask him if
it’s really possible for the dead to communicate with the living. Unfortunately,
they arrive at Dr. Houston’s impressive Art Deco digs on the wrong night — he’s
doing his experiment on Ruth Rogen, trying to isolate her soul so it can’t get
out amongst the living and do more harm. Instead the opposite happens and
Rogen’s soul ends up in the body of Roma Courtney, thereby causing her entire
nature to change immediately (and making Carole Lombard arguably the first
actress to play a multiple personality on screen, a worthy predecessor to
Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve and Sally Field in Sybil). Ruth’s soul is determined to kill Bavian for revenge, then leave Roma
Courtney’s body and let Roma take the fall — and the two first go to Ruth’s
former apartment (where we see plenty of the artworks Ruth made — she was an
artist by profession — including a life-sized self-portrait in which Ruth is
holding an apple, thereby tying herself in with Eve and the original “bad
girl”) and then to the Courtneys’ yacht (which has two smokestacks and looks
big enough to cross the Atlantic), where Ruth is on the point of strangling
Bavian when Randolph Scott comes to the rescue, climbing the ship’s ropes (and
explaining why Victor Halperin felt he needed an action star for the male
lead!) and pulling the Rogen-possessed Roma off Bavian in time to save the bad
guy’s life — though Bavian meets his end anyway by accidentally hanging himself
off the ship’s ropes as he’s trying to flee. One quirk about Supernatural (a movie that seems to be defined by its quirks!) is that in addition to an evil
ghost there’s also a good one, the shade of John Courtney, who causes a model
ship in the storefront of Rogen’s landlord (George Burr Macannan) to fall over
and break, thereby giving Grant and Dr. Houston the clue they need that Roma is
on the yacht; and at the end John’s ghost blows through the pages of a magazine
until it lights on an cruise ad, signaling to Roma and Grant that they should
not only go on the trip to Bermuda Dr. Houston suggested earlier to lighten up
her spirits, they should make it their honeymoon.

Supernatural has its flaws — notably an overly complicated plot
the writers have to race through to keep to a 65-minute running time while
still taking quite a while to show us how the three plot threads link up — but
it’s a stunning movie, brilliantly directed by the uneven but frequently great
Victor Halperin. Though most of the technical people (as well as the cast) were
Paramount contractees, Halperin brought along Arthur Martinelli, his great
cinematographer from White Zombie, and working at a major studio Halperin and Martinelli pushed the
camera moves even farther than they had on the earlier (and cheaper) film.
Halperin seems to have been the sort of director who never wanted to cut when
he could discover characters with his swooping camera instead, and he gets a
surprising number of oblique angles into his film. The acting is generally
quite good: Lombard superbly delineates the two faces of Roma — moping widow
and Rogen-possessed avenging sex kitten — and Dinehart is appropriately slimy,
though through part of the film I must confess I was wondering how it might
have been different if Halperin had cast Bela Lugosi in the role. Not only had
Lugosi been excellent as the fake medium in the 1931 Charlie Chan film The
Black Camel, he also had a
surprisingly romantic streak (showcased mainly in a film from the next year, The
Return of Chandu) and he might have been
more able to make Ruth Rogen’s twisted attraction to Bavian believable than
Dinehart was. Nonetheless, the film is well acted throughout — Beryl Mercer’s
character seems to have stepped in from a James Whale film (though she also
anticipates the drunken landlady Raymond Chandler created in Farewell, My
Lovely seven years later and
Esther Howard brought vividly to life in the second and best film of it, Murder,
My Sweet) and Randolph Scott is O.K.
in a pretty thankless role (but then that could be said of just about all his
non-Westerns; when he climbs the ropes on the yacht to get to Carole Lombard
before she can kill Alan Dinehart you think, “Now I know why they wanted an action star to play her
boyfriend!”). Carlos Clarens, whose book An Illustrated History of the
Horror Film was key to the rediscovery
of White Zombie and its attaining classic
status, wrote off Supernatural as “only moderately effective,” but on its own terms — it’s as much a
psychological thriller as a supernatural horror film — it’s fascinating and
welcome as the only time in the sound era the Halperins got to work at a major
studio.